5 Rules For Eating Sushi

Whether you order a few pieces of it for lunch at the office or have a multicourse omakase after a long day at the culinary academy, sushi is a popular food among Americans these days. It’s packed with unique flavor and is light on your stomach. However, you might be eating this Japanese dish all wrong and not even know it. Here are five rules for eating sushi to keep in mind:

1. Use your chopsticks
Chopsticks can be pretty tricky if you’re not used to them, but that doesn’t mean you should eat sushi with your hands. In fact, you’ll probably get some weird looks from the chef if you do. After you grab the upper chopstick like a pencil, Web Japan recommends putting the second chopstick against your ring finger. Make sure this chopstick is pointing in the same direction as the first chopstick. Then, maneuver the upper chopstick with your index, thumb and middle fingers, picking up sushi between both chopsticks.

2. Don’t wait too long to eat the sushi
Sushi is not the type of food that should sit on your plate too long. According to Zhong Zhen Shi, renowned chef of Sushi Seki in New York City, if you don’t eat sushi as soon as it’s served to you, the texture can get interrupted.

“Here at Sushi Seki, I hand guests their hand roll instead of serving it to them on a wooden plate, which would make the nori lose its crispness due to the moisture of the wood,” he said in interview with Food Republic. “You would lose the whole textural experience of eating that dish.”

3. Don’t put pickled ginger on top of sushi
If you make the mistake of eating your sushi with ginger, you won’t get to experience the true taste of the fish. The ginger is meant to be eaten right after a piece of sushi.

4. Eat sushi in one bite
Unless you want a big mess, never cut a piece of sushi in half. Breaking up the fish is also considered bad etiquette. Sushi is small, so you should not have a problem finishing it in one bite.

5. Don’t submerge your sushi in soy sauce
Sushi has enough flavor on its own and doesn’t need to be covered in soy sauce. In fact, drowning your sushi in this sauce can kill the taste. If you want to add a little soy sauce to your sushi, only dip the fish side in it.